Sex "Education" Increases Sexual Immorality

For over a decade before the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education in the early 1970s . . .  teen pregnancy rates had been falling.  But with the infusion of federal funds into comprehensive sex education, pregnancy rates rose rapidly.  In the late 1970s alone, the teen pregnancy rate rose from 88 to 111 per 1,000 women, and the percentage of girls between fifteen and nineteen years of age who had engaged in intercourse skyrocketed from 27.6 to 42.2.

What happened next makes it difficult to attribute those increases to other factors, such as the general loosening of sexual mores in the culture at large.  In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration blocked federal funding for comprehensive sexuality education and passed federal regulations requiring parental notification when contraceptive services were rendered to teenagers.  Teenage sexual activity and pregnancy rates dropped radically.  Among young black women, the group most vulnerable to early, out-of-wedlock childbearing, sexual activity rates fell by mid-decade to below pre-1971 levels.  As funding for comprehensive sex education resumed in the mid-1980s, pregnancy and teen sexual activity rates shot up once again. . . .

The crux of the problem with comprehensive sex education . . . was freewheeling classroom sex talk that broke down all barriers of social and sexual inhibition.  Inhibition . . . is the safety valve that keeps teenagers from the obvious risks of casual sexual involvement.

Dana Mack, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family, p.157-159